World War I, 1914–18

World War I has aptly been called a war of illusions that exposed in sharp relief all the follies of the prewar generation. The war plans of the generals had misfired at once, and expectations that the intensity of modern firepower would serve the offense, or that the war must be brief, proved horribly false. Germany expected to achieve hegemony in Europe as a step toward world power, and instead world powers were called into play to prevent hegemony in Europe. Socialists thought war would bring general strikes and revolution, and instead the war inspired patriotic national unity. Monarchists hoped war would bolster the old regimes, and instead it cast down the remaining dynasties of eastern Europe. Liberals hoped that war would promote the spread of freedom, and instead it forced even democratic governments to impose censorship, martial law, and command economies subordinated to the dictates of centralized bureaucracy. Each nation in its own way sacrificed one by one those values it claimed to be fighting for in the belief that final victory would make good all the terrible cost. And with terrible irony World War I also ended in various plans for peace as illusory as the plans for war had been. As the historian William McNeill wrote, “the irrationality of rational, professionalized planning could not have been made more patently manifest.”

World War I can be divided, without undue violence to reality, into three periods: the initial battles, struggles for new allies, and mobilization on the home fronts, occupying the period from 1914 to 1916; the onset of ideologized warfare in the Russian revolutions and American entry in 1917; and the final four-way struggle of 1918 among German imperialism, Allied war-aims diplomacy, Wilsonian liberal internationalism, and Leninist bolshevism.

Military stalemate and new belligerents

From grand plans to the trenches

The first months of war resounded with the collision of the war plans pored over for decades by the general staffs of Europe. The original German plan for a two-front war, drafted by Helmuth von Moltke the elder, had called for taking the offensive against Russia and standing on the defensive in the rugged Rhineland. The plan showed military prudence and complemented the stabilizing diplomacy of Bismarck. But Alfred, Graf von Schlieffen, presided over the German military in the era of Kaiser William’s Weltpolitik and adopted a more ambitious and risky course. His plan, conceived in 1891 and completed by 1905, envisioned a massive offensive in the west to knock out the compact French forces in six weeks, whereupon the army could shift eastward to confront the plodding Russians. But a quick decision could be achieved in France only by a vast enveloping action. The powerful right wing of the German army must descend from the north and pass through the neutral Low Countries. This would virtually ensure British intervention. But Schlieffen expected British aid to be too little and too late. In sum, the Schlieffen Plan represented a pristine militarism: the belief that all factors could be accounted for in advance, that execution could be flawless, that pure force could resolve all political problems including those thrown up by the plan itself. In the event, the Germans realized all of the political costs of the Schlieffen Plan and few of the military benefits.

Like the Germans, the French had discarded a more sensible plan in favour of the one implemented. French intelligence had learned of the grand lines of the Schlieffen Plan and its inclusion of reserve troops in the initial assault. General Victor Michel therefore called in 1911 for a blocking action in Belgium in addition to an offensive into Alsace-Lorraine. But this required twice the active troops currently available. France would either have to give up the Belgian screen or the offensive. The new chief of staff, J.-J.-C. Joffre, refused to believe that Germany would deploy reserve corps in immediate combat and gave up the screen.

The traditional British way of war had been maritime: destroy the enemy’s fleet, impose a blockade, and use land forces only to secure key points or aid continental allies at decisive moments. In Sir John Fisher’s phrase, the army “should be regarded as a projectile fired by the navy.” The prewar conversations with France, however, led the War Office to consider how Britain’s army might help in case of war with Germany. General Henry Wilson insisted that even Britain’s six divisions of professionals could tilt the balance between France and Germany and won his case for a British Expeditionary Force. Privately, he conceded that six divisions were “fifty too few” and hoped for a mass conscript army on continental lines.

By October 1914 all the plans had unraveled. After the German defeat in the Battle of the Marne, the Western Front stabilized into an uninterrupted line for 466 miles from Nieuwpoort on the Belgian coast south to Bapaume, then southeast past Soissons, Verdun, Nancy, and so to the Swiss frontier. Both sides dug in, elaborated their trench systems over time, and condemned themselves to four years of hellish stalemate on the Western Front.

The situation was little better on the other front. A necessary assumption of the Schlieffen Plan was the inadequacy of the Russian rail network to support a rapid offensive. By 1914, however, railroads through Poland were much improved, and the Russian general staff agreed to take the offensive in case of war to relieve the pressure on France. Similarly, the Germans had asked the Austrian commander, Conrad von Hötzendorf, to attack Russia and ease the threat to Germany. Austria also had a two-front war, however, and an army too small to fight it. Owing to penury and its nationality problems, the monarchy fielded fewer battalions in 1914 than it had in the war of 1866. As the saying went, Austria was always “en retard d’une armée, d’une année et d’une idée” (“one army, one year, and one idea behind”). Austria’s solution was to send one army south against Serbia and one to Galicia against the Russians and to deploy a third as need required. The reserves, a third of Austria’s already outnumbered forces, spent the opening battles shuttling back and forth on the rails. Austria failed to penetrate Serbian defenses, while the Germans smashed the Russian attack into East Prussia. In the east, too, stalemate set in.

By mid-1915 the Germans had overcome supply problems and were better prepared for trench warfare than the Allies. They also pioneered the concept of “defense in depth,” making a second trench line the main barrier to assault. Allied generals responded with longer and denser artillery bombardments but thereby relinquished the element of surprise. Such tactics turned western battlefields into seas of wreckage, with a “storm of steel” raging above, and condemned hundreds of thousands of men for the sake of a few thousand yards of no-man’s-land. Allied attacks in 1915 cost the British more than 300,000 casualties and the French 1,500,000. The only German initiative, the Second Battle of Ypres, introduced poison gas to the Western Front. But no commander could see a means of breaking the deadlock, and all confessed their strategy to be one of attrition.

The war at sea and abroad

The stalemate on land was matched by stalemate at sea when the British decided to impose a distant rather than close blockade of the German coast. This reduced the danger to the Grand Fleet and, it was hoped, might entice the German navy to venture out for a decisive battle. Admiral von Tirpitz was prepared to run such a risk, believing that the technical superiority of his High Seas Fleet would balance out Britain’s numerical edge. Only by risking all on a major fleet action might Germany break the blockade, but the Kaiser and civilian leadership wished to preserve their fleet as a bargaining chip in eventual peace talks, while the British dared not provoke an engagement, since a major defeat would be disastrous. Admiral John Jellicoe, it was said, was “the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon.”

In the wide world, the Allies cleared the seas of German commerce raiders and seized the German colonial empire. In the Pacific, New Zealanders took German Samoa and Australians German New Guinea. On August 23, 1914, the Japanese empire honoured its alliance with Britain by declaring war on Germany. Tokyo had no intention of aiding its ally’s cause in Europe but was pleased to occupy the Marshall and Caroline archipelagos and lay siege to Germany’s Chinese port of Qingdao, which surrendered in November. Germany’s African colonies were, on the outbreak of war, immediately cut off from communications and supply from home, but military operations were needed to eliminate the German presence. By early 1916, Togoland (Togo) and Kamerun (Cameroon) had fallen to Anglo-French colonial forces and German South West Africa (Namibia) to the South Africans. Only in German East Africa was a native force under Lieutenant Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, numbering initially just 12,000 men, able to survive for the entire war, tying down 10 times that number of Allied troops.

Efforts to break the stalemate

Thus, all the armies and navies of Europe faced each other across fortified front lines. The prewar plans had succumbed to the technological surprise of 1914–15: that the withering firepower of machine guns, cartridge rifles, and rapid-fire artillery favoured the defense. Infantry in deep trenches, fronted with mines and barbed wire and backed by artillery, could not be dislodged by frontal attack. Accordingly, military and political leaders spent the war groping for means of breaking the stalemate in the trenches. First, neutrals might be enticed to enter the war, perhaps throwing enough weight into the balance to provide victory. Second, new weapons, tactics, and theatres might break the deadlock or achieve strategic goals elsewhere. Third, more and more men and matériel might be squeezed out of the home economy to tip the balance of forces or wear down the enemy by economic attrition. The first of these means determined much of the diplomatic history of the war. The second stimulated technological developments such as poison gas, tanks, and submarines, as well as the peripheral campaigns of southern Europe and the Middle East. The third determined the evolution of war economies and the character of what came to be called total war.

The first of the European neutrals to join the fray was the Ottoman Empire. Having lost the Balkans before 1914 and fearing partition of their Arab possessions by the Triple Entente, the Young Turks under Enver Paşa looked to Germany, whose military efficiency they admired. Enver led in negotiating a secret German-Ottoman treaty, signed August 2, 1914. But the grand vizier and others in the sultan’s court held back, even after extracting a German loan—tantamount to a bribe—of £5,000,000. The war party then resorted to more extreme measures. The Ottoman fleet, reinforced by two German cruisers, entered the Black Sea in October, bombarded Odessa and the Crimean ports, and sank two Russian ships. The commander then falsified his account to make it appear that the enemy had provoked the action. The outraged Russians declared war on November 1. The Ottoman Empire’s alliance with the Central Powers was a serious blow to the Entente, for it effectively isolated Russia from its Western allies and weakened their hand in the Balkan capitals. The Turks concluded, however, that a Triple Entente victory in the war would lead to the partition of their empire even if they remained neutral (Allied negotiations had already begun to this effect), whereas joining forces with Germany gave them at least a fighting chance to survive and perhaps even win some spoils from Russia. Enver also declared a jihad, or holy war, inciting Muslims to rise up against British and Russian rule in India, Persia, and Central Asia.

Turkish forces deployed along the coasts of the Dardanelles and on the Caucasus frontier with Russia, where severe fighting began in the rugged mountains. Enver, with German encouragement, took the strategic offensive when he ordered 10,000 troops from Syria to attack the Suez Canal in late January 1915. After crossing the Sinai Peninsula the tired soldiers found Indian and Australasian divisions in training, as well as gunboats and other equipment they could not match. The Turks fell back to Palestine and never menaced the canal again.

The vulnerability and value of the Dardanelles in turn attracted the British. When Russia requested a Western assault on Turkey to relieve the pressure in the Caucasus, War Secretary Lord Kitchener and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill promoted an attack on the Dardanelles. By capturing Constantinople, the British could link up with the Russians, knock Turkey out of the war, and perhaps entice the Balkan states to rally to the Allied cause. The British War Council created an amphibious force of British, Australians, and New Zealanders to capture the heights of the Gallipoli Peninsula. On April 25 the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) forces went ashore, but their assaults on the heights of Sari Bair were turned back through the charismatic leadership of the young Turkish officer Mustafa Kemal. A sweltering, bloody deadlock dragged on into the summer. Five more divisions and another amphibious landing, at Suvla Bay in August, failed to take the rugged heights in the face of human wave counterattacks by the Turks. Cabinet opinion gradually turned against the campaign, and the Allied force of 83,000 was evacuated—a dangerous operation conducted with great skill—in January 1916. The Turks had lost some 300,000 men, the Allies about 250,000 to battle and disease. Gallipoli was, in Clement Attlee’s words, “the one strategic idea of the war.” Its failure, through bad leadership, planning, and luck, condemned the Allies to seek a decision in bloody battles of attrition on the Western Front.

The other peripheral front that enticed Allied strategists was Austria’s border with Italy. Though a member of the Triple Alliance, the Rome government maintained on August 3, 1914, that it was not bound to fight since Austria had not been attacked nor had it consulted with Italy as the treaty required. Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, a nationalist dedicated to the Irredentists’ goal of recovery of Trentino and Trieste from Austria, announced that Italy would be informed by sacro egoismo. This, he explained, was a mystical rather than cynical concept, but it set off seven months of haggling over what the Allies would offer Italy to enter the war, and what the Central Powers would offer for neutrality. Some considerations were objective: Italy’s 4,160 miles of coastline made defense against the Anglo-French fleet virtually impossible; any gains extorted from the Central Powers for neutrality would hardly be secure should those powers win the war; and neutrality was incompatible with Italy’s tenuous claim to be a great power. What was more, all the Central Powers could offer was Trentino, and even that promise had to be forced from Vienna by German pressure.

After a clumsy intervention by the Russian foreign minister, Sazonov, in which he tried to secure Italy’s help and still protect Serbian interests on the Dalmatian coast, negotiations moved to London. Berlin dispatched ex-chancellor Bülow and Roman Catholic statesman Matthias Erzberger to Rome to plead for the Central Powers. On April 26, the day after the first Gallipoli landing, the Treaty of London committed Italy to enter the war against Austria-Hungary within a month. In return the Allies promised Italy Trentino, part of South Tirol, Trieste, a third of Dalmatia (at the expense of Serbian ambitions), a mandate over Albania, a portion of German East Africa, all of Libya, a part of Asia Minor, and a 1,250,000,000-lira war chest from Britain. Still, a month of crisis followed in Rome as journalists like Gabriele D’Annunzio and Benito Mussolini stoked war fever and parliamentary power-broker Giovanni Giolitti (backed by Bülow) maneuvered for peace and parecchio—the “much” that might be obtained from Austria without lifting a rifle. After a cabinet crisis Salandra returned to power to declare war on Austria-Hungary on May 23, 1915 (though Italy did not declare war on Germany until August 1916).

General Luigi Cadorna’s war plan called for a strategic defense in the mountainous Trentino while half the Italian army concentrated for attack along the Isonzo River to the south. In June 1915 he launched the first of 11 battles of the Isonzo, wasting some 250,000 men against the rocky parapets and spirited Austrian defenders. The southern front became another deadlock, while Italy’s weak finances and industry would only make her a continuing drain on Anglo-French resources.

After Turkey and Italy, attention turned to the neutral Balkan states. The entry of the Balkan states on the side of the Central Powers would doom Serbia and open direct communications between Germany and Turkey. Balkan participation on the Allied side would isolate Turkey and complete the encirclement of Austria-Hungary. The Central Powers had the upper hand in Bulgaria, still smarting from its defeat in the Second Balkan War and allied with Turkey as of August 2, 1914. The Allies had little to offer Bulgaria except bribes, especially after their failure at Gallipoli. German offers proved irresistible: Macedonia (from Serbia) and parts of the Dobruja and Thrace should Romania and Greece intervene. Bulgaria joined the Central Powers on September 6, 1915. In Romania the Allies had the upper hand despite a treaty, renewed in 1913, binding Bucharest and its Hohenzollern dynasty to the Triple Alliance. Romania’s main ambition was to annex Transylvania, a Habsburg province populated largely by Romanians, but Prime Minister Ionel Brătianu determined to stay neutral and observe the fortunes of war.

In 1915 those fortunes appeared to favour the Central Powers on the Turkish, Italian, Serbian, and Russian fronts. The Russian front collapsed in the face of a German offensive in May, allowing the Central Powers to reoccupy Galicia, Lithuania, and Courland in the north. In July the Germans resumed the drive and threatened to pincer the entire Russian army in Poland. Warsaw fell on August 5 and Brest-Litovsk on the 26th, whereupon the German armies outran their supplies and halted the drive on a line stretching from Riga on the Baltic to Czernowitz on the Romanian border. Russian losses were apocalyptic: more than a million men captured and at least as many killed and wounded in 1915. Technical inferiority, shortage of munitions, and poor tactics led to terrible wastage of men in the attack and lack of mobility on the defense. The inadequacy of the Russian state and economy in modern war now stood revealed. Desertions increased and morale plummeted. On September 5, Tsar Nicholas himself took over supreme command, a chivalrous move but one that would identify the crown with future disasters.

In 1916 German strategists again turned west with the expressed intention of bleeding France white and breaking her army’s spirit. The object of attack was to be the fortress of Verdun, and the plan called for the substitution of ordnance for manpower as much as possible, thereby using Germany’s industrial might to kill Frenchmen in the most efficient way. The assault began on February 21, following an avalanche of shells and poison gas, and continued without interruption for five months. France’s civilian and military leadership turned Verdun into a national symbol of resistance, symbolized by General Philippe Pétain’s famous order of the day: “Ils ne passeront pas!” Verdun was the most intensive battle in history and cost France and Germany more than 300,000 men each.

In December 1915 an Allied conference at Chantilly had decided to coordinate simultaneous attacks on all fronts. Given Verdun, responsibility for the Western assault fell to the British. After elaborate preparation and a week of bombardment the cream of “Kitchener’s New Army” went over the top on July 1, 1916, and strode in formation toward the German lines. By mid-November the Somme offensive had gained about six and a half miles across a 30-mile front at the cost of 420,000 Britons, 194,000 Frenchmen, and 440,000 Germans.

On the Eastern Front in 1916 the Russian command dutifully took up the offensive to relieve the pressure on Verdun and in coordination with the push on the Somme. But failures in leadership and supply, poor intelligence and tactics again thwarted the courage of Russia’s peasant-soldiers, 100,000 of whom were lost in a March attack that achieved nothing. The last gasp of the tsarist army followed in June. Russian attacks at Lutsk, Buchach, and Czernowitz beginning June 4 achieved total surprise, captured 200,000 men, and overran Bukovina by the end of the month. This apparent revival of Russia’s fortunes prompted the Romanians, finally, to declare war on Austria-Hungary on August 27, 1916. Half the Romanian army—12 divisions—joined the offensive and advanced into Transylvania, expecting to deal the final blow to staggering Austria-Hungary. Instead, Germany, Turkey, and Bulgaria promptly declared war on Romania. The Romanians held out for a month against a German-Austrian-Bulgarian attack at the Vulcan and Szurduk (Surduc) passes, but the Central Powers broke through and captured Bucharest on December 6. The Romanian gambit ended in disaster as the Germans acquired their oil and wheat and the Russians inherited an additional 300 miles of frontline. Meanwhile, the Russian offensive degenerated into frontal assaults and closed in August. Russia had lost 500,000 men—the last trained reserves of the tsarist army.

By the end of 1916 what may be called the traditional phase of the war had run its course. Despite ever greater expenditures of men and matériel and the accession of neutral powers to one side or the other, victory remained elusive. Henceforth the coalitions would rely all the more on breaking the internal cohesion of the enemy or on calling forth global forces to tip the balance. The resort to revolution, especially in Russia, and extra-European powers, especially the United States, would have profound consequences for Europe’s future in the 20th century, while internal mobilization for total war had already gone far to reshape European societies.

War mobilization at home and abroad

When the first campaigns failed and the belligerents steeled themselves to fight a long war of attrition, World War I became total—that is, a war fought without limitations, between entire societies and not just between armies, with total victory the only acceptable outcome. It became such a war because, for the first time, the industrial and bureaucratic resources existed to mobilize an entire nation’s strength, because the stalemate required total mobilization, and because the tremendous cost and suffering of such a war seemed to preclude settling for a negotiated truce. Only victory might redeem the terrible sacrifices already made by both sides; and if final victory were the only acceptable end, then any means could be justified in pursuit of it.

The first violent battles of 1914 nearly expended prewar munitions reserves. By mid-war the artillerymen of the Western Front might fire more shells in a single day than were expended in the entire Franco-German War. Clearly the home front—the war economy—would be the most decisive of all. And yet the governments, expecting a short war, were unprepared for economic mobilization and had to adjust to emergencies and shortages as they arose. In Germany the process began in the first days of war when private manufacturers, especially Walther Rathenau, suggested a state bureau to distribute raw materials to industry. Over the years it became a model for new agencies, boards, and commissions controlling production, labour, rationing, travel, wages and prices. By late 1917, Germany came to dominate the economies of Austria-Hungary and the occupied regions by the same means. In all the belligerent nations, to a greater or lesser degree, civil and economic liberties, the free market, even national sovereignty, gave way to a kind of military socialism in the crucible of war. All the belligerents met their labour needs through employment of old men, children, and women (a fact that ensured the success of the suffragist movement in Europe after the war). The Allies also engaged in economic war through agreements with neutral countries on the Continent not to re-export goods to Germany and through preemptive purchase of everything from Chilean nitrates to Romanian wheat.

An economic problem that could be postponed was the financial one. The belligerents immediately ended controvertibility of their currencies according to the gold standard and liquidated their holdings overseas. By late 1915 the British and French also began to float sizable loans on the American market, even as they themselves underwrote the war efforts of weaker economies like the Italian and Russian. British, Germans, and Americans covered a fraction of the war’s expense through income and other taxes, but World War I was financed primarily through war bonds and secondarily through loans from abroad. This pattern would exacerbate the diplomatic and domestic political climates after the war, when the bills for the four years’ wastage came due.

The weapon of morale

The mass conscripted army and labour force, the employment of women and children, and the mobilization of science, industry, and agriculture meant that virtually every citizen contributed to the war effort. Hence all governments tried to stoke morale on the home front, subvert that of the enemy, and sway the opinions of neutrals. A variety of techniques for manipulating information were used, including particularly censorship and vilification of the enemy. German propaganda depicted Russians as semi-Asiatic barbarians and the French as mere cannon fodder for the bloated, envious British Empire lusting to destroy Germany’s power, prosperity, and Kultur. The French Maison de la Presse and British Ministry of Information took German war guilt for granted and made great play of the atrocities committed by the “Hun” in Belgium and on the high seas, where defenseless passenger ships were treacherously torpedoed. War hatred whipped up by such propaganda made it all the more difficult to justify negotiating a truce.

The Allies proved more adept than the Germans at psychological warfare. Propaganda was distributed across German lines by shells, planes, rockets, balloons, and radio. Such activities were given into the hands of an Inter-Allied Propaganda Commission in 1918. The Allies also, especially after 1917, identified themselves with such universal principles as democracy and national self-determination, while the German war effort had only a narrow national appeal. The most important target of propaganda was the United States. In the first weeks of war the British cut the German transatlantic cables and subsequently controlled the flow of news to America. German attempts to influence U.S. opinion were invariably clumsy, while the British, aided by the common language, reminded Americans of their common values for which German militarism had no respect. In political warfare, German attempts to arouse the Muslim world and incite India to rebellion were stillborn, while their exploitation of the situation in Ireland, culminating in the Easter Rising of 1916, backfired. The aristocratic and continental German officials seemed out of their element when either trying to appeal to the masses or looking beyond Europe. But their one success was nothing less than the Russian Revolution of 1917 (see belowThe Russian Revolution).

War aims and peace feelers

War aims of the belligerents

For what were the nations of Europe making such total and mortal commitments? In public each government insisted it was fighting first in self-defense, then for victory and some hallowed national goal like naval security for Britain, Alsace-Lorraine for France, or Constantinople for Russia. But in private, now that peacetime constraints were torn off, each indulged greater ambitions. German war aims took shape at once in the September Program of Bethmann. While debate exists over how much this document reflected Bethmann’s real views, it did come to represent the prevailing view of the military, which in turn came to speak increasingly for Germany as a whole. The dream of world power seemed within reach through the acquisition of Belgian and French colonies that, when joined to Germany’s and perhaps Portugal’s, would constitute a Mittelafrika of immense proportions. In Europe the Germans determined to assure that France and Russia would pose no threat in the future and to create an economic base suitable for a world power. This notion of a single economic bloc from Berlin to Baghdad, including Belgium, the Longwy-Briey mines of France, Poland, Courland, the Ukraine, and the Balkans, was popularized as Mitteleuropa in a 1915 best-seller by Friedrich Naumann. How committed Germany’s civilian leadership was to this hegemonic plan is disputed: Bethmann favoured abandoning much of it in hopes of a negotiated peace. But a war-aims majority held the balance in the Reichstag until 1917 and in the military until the bitter end.

On September 5, 1914, the entente powers solemnly and severally renounced any separate peace, but throughout the war they felt constrained to bolster each other’s will to fight with promises of spoils. Hence the purchase of Italy’s belligerency and the shocking willingness of Britain and France to consign Constantinople to Russia in March 1915. In general, Allied ambitions added up to the partition of the German and Ottoman empires and security against Germany in Europe and on the seas. Partition of Austria-Hungary was not an initial Allied aim. In the spring of 1915 France and Russia exchanged letters promising that both could do as they wished on their borders with Germany, implying a free hand for Russia in Galicia and East Prussia and the same for France on the Rhine. French industry contemplated an advance into the Saar and Rhine regions to end France’s inferiority in coal production (which would only be exacerbated by the return of Alsace-Lorraine with its rich iron deposits). For the French army and foreign ministry, however, the main motive for separating the Rhineland from Germany was security: what Poincaré called “breaking Prussian militarism” and Aristide Briand “guarantees of lasting peace.” In 1917 Paris and St. Petersburg were close to a formal treaty on the German boundaries when the Russian Revolution intervened.

The Allies specified their colonial claims in an agreement of April 1916: Britain won influence in Mesopotamia and part of Syria; France in the rest of Syria, Lebanon, Cilicia, and southern Kurdistan; and Russia in Armenia and northern Kurdistan; Palestine was placed under joint Anglo-French administration. The Sykes–Picot Agreement in May also divided much of the Ottoman Empire into British and French spheres. The Agreement of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne of April 1917 promised Italy concessions on the Anatolian coast; one Allied motive in this was to persuade Rome to scale down its claims on Austria-Hungary in hopes of a separate peace with Vienna (see belowWar-weariness and diplomacy). Finally, the French began in 1916 to formulate a second set of war aims directed, not at Germany, but at their own allies. British currency supports, loans, coal shipments at fixed prices, and other benefits helped sustain the French war effort, and the minister of commerce, Étienne Clémentel, lobbied for an extension of these supports beyond an armistice lest France win the military struggle only to lose the postwar economic struggle. The British agreed at the Allied Economic Conference of 1916, and the following year the French placed even greater hopes of economic solidarity in the newly associated power, the United States.

Attitude of the United States

Since 1783 the United States had acquired a number of foreign policy traditions. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, admonished his young and vulnerable country to avoid alliances that would drag it into disputes in which it had no interest. Thus was born a powerful isolationist and exclusivist tradition. The Monroe Doctrine declared the Western Hemisphere off-limits to European adventurism, giving birth to a regionalist and paternalist tradition vis-à-vis Latin America. After the Civil War, belief in America’s Manifest Destiny directed national attention to the West Coast and beyond. Then the war against Spain in 1898 yielded colonial possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific and inspired the building of a two-ocean navy and of a Panama Canal to serve it. By 1914, when the canal opened, the United States was already the greatest industrial power in the world, yet its tradition of exclusivity and its tiny standing army gave the Europeans excuse to ignore America’s potential might.

In August 1914 President Woodrow Wilson implored the American people to be “neutral in thought as well as deed” with respect to the European war. In so doing he was not only honouring tradition but also applying his own religious principles to foreign policy. His agenda upon entering the White House in 1913 had been domestic reform, and he had written that it would be an irony of fate should foreign policy come to dominate in his administration. Yet when fate so decreed, Wilson preferred to trust his own motives and methods rather than the advice of his secretaries of state or his other advisers. Wilson deplored the war and earnestly wished to bring about a just and lasting peace through U.S. mediation, for what greater mission could Providence assign to that “city on a hill,” the United States of America?

American power began to figure in the balance of war almost from the start. Trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange when war broke out, but when it resumed in November 1914, Europeans sold most of the $4,000,000,000 worth of securities they held before the war. U.S. loans to belligerents were at first declared “inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality,” but the large Anglo-French orders for U.S. munitions, raw materials, and food created an economic boom, and by 1915 the Allies needed credit to continue their purchases. An initial £200,000,000 loan in September 1915 led eventually to billions being floated on the U.S. market and a complete reversal of the financial relationship between the Old World and the New. By 1917 the United States was no longer a debtor nation but the world’s greatest creditor. U.S. firms also inherited many overseas markets, especially in Latin America, which the British and Germans could no longer serve.

To Americans neutrality seemed both moral and lucrative—the United States, said Wilson, was “too proud to fight.” But the failure of his peace initiatives, the German assaults on neutrals’ rights at sea, and the cumulative effect of Allied propaganda and German provocations conjoined to end U.S. neutrality by 1917. On February 4, 1915, Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone in which Allied ships would be sunk, without warning if necessary. While this procedure dispensed with traditional civilities like boarding, search and seizure, and care of civilians, effective submarine warfare required it. Underwater craft relied on stealth and surprise and exposed themselves to easy destruction once they made their presence known. Thus, even though the British blockade interfered with neutral shipping more than the German blockade, the latter appeared far more beastly. The sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915, which killed over a thousand passengers, including 128 U.S. citizens, outraged U.S. public opinion despite the rightful German claim that she was carrying munitions (173 tons worth). Two more passenger ships, the Arabic and Hesperia, went down in August and September, respectively, whereupon American diplomatic protests caused civil officials in Berlin to overrule the military command and call off unrestricted submarine warfare, although the issue did not remain settled.

Wilson’s own peace initiatives, including an offer of mediation by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in 1914 and a trip to Europe by Wilson’s personal aide and adviser, Colonel Edward M. House, in 1915, were unsuccessful. Early in 1916 House returned to Europe and on February 22 in London agreed to a formula whereby the United States would summon a peace conference and—if Germany refused to attend or proved unreasonable—“would leave the conference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies.” Wilson later drew back from the guarantee and added the word “probably” after “would.” But the British themselves shied from promoting such a conference, while the other belligerents also ducked the suggestion lest they compromise the determination of their people or incur the distrust of allies.

By the end of 1916 Germany had 102 U-boats ready for service, many of the latest type, and the chief of the naval staff assured the kaiser that unrestricted submarine warfare would sink 600,000 tons of Allied shipping per month and force Britain to make peace within five months. Bethmann fought to delay escalation of the submarine war in hopes of another Wilsonian peace move. But the president held off new initiatives during his reelection campaign. When he had still not acted by December 1916, Bethmann was forced to make a deal with his own military, which consented to tolerate a German peace offer in return for Bethmann’s endorsement of unrestricted submarine warfare if the offer failed. But the army helped ensure that the German note (released December 12) would fail by insisting on implicit retention by Germany of Belgium and other battlefield conquests. Wilson followed on the 18th with an invitation to the two camps to define their war aims as a prelude to negotiation. The Allies demanded evacuation of occupied lands and guarantees against Germany in the future. The Germans stuck to their December note, and the military command decided to resume unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1.

The United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3 and commenced the arming of merchant ships on March 9. Meanwhile, German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann, anticipating war with the United States over the U-boat issue, cabled an offer of alliance to Mexico on January 16, promising Mexico its own “lost provinces” of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico in case of war with the United States. British intelligence intercepted the Zimmermann telegram and leaked it to Washington, further inflaming American opinion. When U-boats proceeded in mid-March to sink the Algonquin, City of Memphis, Vigilancia, and Illinois (the latter two without warning), Wilson went before Congress and in a lofty and moving address reviewed the reasons why America was forced to take up the sword—why, “God helping her, she can do no other.” On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war on Germany, and the United States became an associated (not an Allied) power. Henceforth World War I hinged on whether the U-boats could force Britain to her knees and the German armies overwhelm the sagging Western Front before the men and matériel of the aroused Yankees could arrive in France.

The crises of 1917

War-weariness and diplomacy

For every belligerent, 1917 was a year of crisis at home and at the front, a year of wild swings and near disasters, and by the time it was over the very nature of the war had changed dramatically. A French offensive in the spring soon ground to a standstill, sparking a wave of mutinies and indiscipline in the trenches that left the French army virtually useless as an offensive force. The British offensive of July–November, called variously Passchendaele or the Third Battle of Ypres, was a tactical disaster that ended in a viscous porridge of mud. That offensive action could be ordered under such conditions is a measure of how far Western Front generals had been seduced into a gothic unreality. Allied and German casualties “in Flanders Fields, where poppies grow” numbered between 500,000 and 800,000. The British Army, too, neared the end of its offensive capacities.

For two years the Italian front had been left unchanged by the first nine battles of the Isonzo, but the underfinanced and underindustrialized Italian war effort gradually eroded. The Tenth Battle of the Isonzo (May–June 1917) cost Italy dearly, while the Eleventh (August–September) registered a “success” amounting to some five miles of advance at a cost of over 300,000 casualties, pushing the total for the war to more than 1,000,000. With peace propaganda, strikes, and communist agitation spreading throughout Italy, and the Austrians in need of stiffening, the German high command reinforced the Austrians at Caporetto. Within days the Italian commander had to order a general retreat. The Germans broke the line of the Tagliamento as well, and not until the Italians regrouped at the Piave on November 7 did the front stabilize. Caporetto cost Italy 340,000 dead and wounded, 300,000 prisoners, and another 350,000 deserters: an incredible 1,000,000 in all, suggesting that the Italian army, like the French, was on strike against its own leadership.

Among the Central Powers also, 1917 intensified the yearning for peace. Polish, Czech, and Yugoslav leaders had formed committees in exile to agitate for the autonomy or independence of their peoples, while war-weariness among those at home grew with food shortages, bad news from the front, and desertions among the troops. When Emperor Franz Joseph died in November 1916 after 68 years on the throne, there was a sense that the empire must die with him. Austro-Hungarian officials already had begun to look for a way out of the war—which meant a way out of the German alliance. The new Habsburg foreign minister, Ottokar, Graf Czernin, raised the issue of war aims and peace at his first ministerial meeting with the new emperor, Charles. A negotiated peace could only be one without victors or vanquished, conquests or indemnities—so said Czernin 10 days before Wilson’s own “Peace Without Victory” speech. The only means of achieving such a peace, however, was for Austria-Hungary’s ally Germany to restore Belgium and, perhaps, Alsace-Lorraine.

The first Austrian demarches, made through Scandinavia, came to nothing, and so Charles, Czernin, and the Empress Zita tried again in late January 1917 through the intermediary of her brother, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma, on leave from service in the Belgian army. In March, Charles drafted a letter in which he asked Sixtus to convey to the president of France his “lively sympathies” and support for the evacuation of Belgium and the lost provinces. The cautious French premier, Alexandre Ribot, shared the news in April with Lloyd George, who said simply, “That means peace.” But Baron Sonnino, at the Conference of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, refused to consider peace with Austria-Hungary (the only enemy Italy was interested in fighting) and warned Lloyd George against attempts to split their alliance. Charles’s second letter, in May, which inexplicably told the French and British of an “Italian peace offer” that was never made, only put the Allies on their guard.

Simultaneously the parliamentary forces of Germany rose in protest against the war, the erosion of civilian authority, and the war-aims stubbornness of the military command. A moderate annexationist deputy, Matthias Erzberger, met with Czernin and Emperor Charles in April 1917 and learned that Austria-Hungary’s military strength was near its end. In May a Reichstag committee demanded that the army be placed under civilian control. The kaiser and the military high command replied with scorn. In July, Bethmann was forced to resign and the army assumed de facto control of Germany. When the kaiser appointed a nonentity, Georg Michaelis, as chancellor, the Reichstag passed a peace resolution on July 19 by a vote of 212–126. But the resolution could have no bearing on the ruling circles, to whom compromise with the foreign enemy meant surrender to the domestic forces of reform.

In mid-August, Pope Benedict XV tried to preserve momentum toward a truce by calling on all parties to evacuate occupied regions, but the German government again refused to surrender Belgium, while the American reply to the Vatican seemed to insist on the democratization of Germany. Emperor Charles and Czernin were likewise unable to make headway, for the Allies were not at this point seeking a general peace but only a separate peace with Austria-Hungary that would leave Germany stranded. This Vienna could not in honour do, nor Berlin permit. The United States declared war on Austria-Hungary on December 7, 1917, and, when the French government leaked news the following spring of the Austrian peace correspondence, Charles and Czernin were forced to humble themselves before the kaiser and German high command at Spa. Austria-Hungary had become a virtual satellite of the German military empire.

The Ottoman Empire in 1917 began to give way before the relatively mild but incessant pressure on fronts the other powers considered sideshows. Baghdad fell to British forces in March. Sir Edmund Allenby, having promised Lloyd George that he would deliver Jerusalem to the British people “as a Christmas present,” made good his promise on December 9. The political future of Palestine, however, was a source of confusion. In the war-aims treaties, the British had divided the Middle East into colonial spheres of influence. In their dealings with the Arabs the British spoke of independence for the region. Then, on November 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration promised “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” albeit without prejudice to “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour was persuaded that this action was in British interest by the energetic appeals of Chaim Weizmann, but in the long run it would cause no end of difficulty for British diplomacy.

The one flank on which Turkey had not been besieged was the Balkan, where an Allied force remained in place at Salonika pending resolution of the Greek political struggle. The Allies continued to back Prime Minister Eleuthérios Venizélos, who, because King Constantine still favoured the Central Powers, had fled Athens in September 1916 and set up a provisional government under Allied protection at Salonika. Finally, the Anglo-French forces deposed Constantine in June 1917 and installed Venizélos in Athens, whereupon Greece declared war on the Central Powers. By the end of 1917, therefore, Turkey, like Austria, was exhausted, beleaguered on four fronts, and wholly dependent on German support.

While Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey all survived their crises of 1917 and found the will and stamina for one last year of war, Russia succumbed. In three years of war Russia had mobilized roughly 10 percent of its entire population and lost over half of that number in battle. The home economy was stretched to the limit, and even the arms and food it could produce were subject to vagaries of transport and corruption in the supply services. Inflation and food shortages panicked the towns, and shortages of fuel isolated the countryside. Suddenly, on March 12, 1917, the parliament and Petrograd soviet (workers’ and soldiers’ council) joined forces to form a Provisional Government. Three days later the Tsar abdicated.

Two leading ministers in the new regime, Aleksandr Kerensky and Pavel Milyukov, hoped to streamline the state and invigorate the war effort. Political liberals, they valued Russia’s ties to Britain and France and even looked forward to capturing Constantinople as a means of legitimating the new regime. Kerensky assured the Allies on March 17 that Russia would fight “unswervingly and indefatigably” until victory. The local soviets and leftist parties, however, forced a declaration in April by which “free Russia” renounced domination over other nations and their territories. When Prince Gyorgy Lvov, the prime minister, promised to accept the revolutionary formula of “no annexations, no indemnities” on May 15, Milyukov stepped down as foreign minister. President Wilson was especially moved by the spectacle of Russia embracing democracy, and all the Allies could now truly depict their cause as moral and ideological: “to make the world safe for democracy,” as Wilson said, in opposition to militarism and imperialism. Russia’s ability to fight steadily and rapidly deteriorated, however. The Petrograd soviet called for abolition of the officer corps, and the Provisional Government abolished courts-martial and issued a Declaration of Soldiers’ Rights.

The Provisional Government’s decision to continue the war was a grave disappointment to the Germans. Since 1914 they had dabbled in revolutionary intrigues in hopes of shattering Russia from within. The campaign took two forms: collaboration with nationalist agitators among the Finns, Baltic peoples, Poles, Ukrainians, and Georgians; and support for Russian social revolutionaries. Lenin, leader of the most virulent wing of Russian Marxists, the Bolsheviks, was living in Kraków when the war broke out and was promptly arrested. An Austrian Social Democrat, Victor Adler, persuaded the Austrian minister of the interior that Lenin was an ally in the fight against Russia, whereupon he was released into Switzerland. Another Russian émigré and socialist, Alexander Helphand, impressed the German ambassador in Constantinople with his revolutionary connections and was soon briefing the German foreign ministry in Berlin. In March 1915 the Germans set aside the first 2,000,000 of what would eventually total 41,000,000 marks spent on secret subversion in Russia.

After the first Eastern Front victories in 1915, Berlin had hoped to entice Russia into a separate peace, and efforts to that end continued up to March 1917. Behind the scenes, however, Helphand’s organization, supported by the German foreign office, worked to spread revolutionary and pacifist ideas inside Russia. After Kerensky’s declaration that Russia would stay in the war, the German command determined to facilitate Lenin’s return to Russia. On April 9, 1917, he and his comrades were placed aboard a special security train in Zürich for the trip across Germany, continued by boat to Sweden and thence by rail to Petrograd.

Bolshevik propaganda penetrated the army, which even the Russian high command confessed was “a huge, weary, shabby, and ill-fed mob of angry men.” In an attempt to restore it to fighting trim, General Lavr Kornilov urged on Kerensky a number of reforms (August 16), but behind Kornilov were conspirators hoping for military dictatorship. Kerensky grasped the danger to himself, forbade troop movements to the capital lest they support a coup, and then had Kornilov arrested. The division between the centre and right gravely weakened the Provisional Government and strengthened the Bolsheviks, who took the lead in denouncing this “counterrevolutionary plot.” The Provisional Government, bereft of authority and will, hoped to hold on until elections for a Constituent Assembly in December. Lenin, knowing that he stood to lose by the fact and the result of free elections, struck in November, and the Provisional Government collapsed in the face of the Bolshevik coup d’état.

One of Lenin’s first acts as revolutionary dictator of Russia was to attempt to transform the European war of nations into a war of classes. His ringing speech of November 8 appealed to workers and soldiers everywhere to force an immediate armistice, end secret diplomacy, and negotiate a peace of “no annexations, no indemnities.” Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Karl Radek promptly organized to spread revolution abroad. The expected uprisings occurred nowhere, but peace was mandatory for Russia if the Bolshevik regime were to survive. On December 15, therefore, Lenin’s regime signed an armistice with the Central Powers.

Last battles and armistice

Russia’s withdrawal from the war

The events of 1917 meant that World War I was no longer a two-sided contest. Rather, four visions of the future competed for the allegiance of governments and peoples. Germany fought on in hope of victory and domination of the Continent. The Allies fought on to frustrate Germany and realize their own ambitious war aims. Wilson’s America fought as an “associated power” for a liberal internationalist agenda opposed to German and Allied imperialism alike. Finally, Lenin’s Russia raised a second challenge to the old diplomacy in the name of socialist internationalism. German, Allied, Wilsonian, and Bolshevik images of the peace differed so radically that the war was now as much ideological as it was military.

Lloyd George and Wilson replied to Lenin’s peace initiatives with speeches of their own to reassure their peoples, contrast their liberal goals with those of the Germans, and perhaps persuade Russia to remain in the field. Lloyd George insisted before the Trades Union Congress (January 5, 1918) that “we are not fighting a war of aggression against the German people,” and he stressed autonomous development for all peoples, including those of Austria-Hungary. Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech (January 8, 1918) called for (1) open covenants, openly arrived at; (2) freedom of the seas; (3) lowering of economic barriers; (4) reduction of armaments; (5) colonial arrangements respecting the will of the peoples involved; (6) national self-determination for the peoples of Russia; (7) restoration of Belgium; (8) return of all invaded territory plus Alsace-Lorraine to France; (9) Italian recovery of her irredente; (10) autonomy for the nationalities of Austria-Hungary; (11) restoration of the Balkan states and access to the sea for Serbia; (12) autonomy for the peoples of the Ottoman Empire and free navigation through the Dardanelles; (13) an independent Poland with access to the sea; and (14) a “general association of nations” offering “mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity.” In his Four Principles (February 11) and Five Particulars (September 27) speeches Wilson elaborated his views on national self-determination, a truly revolutionary idea with global, but unpredictable, implications.

Allied assurances failed to dissuade the Bolsheviks from exiting the alliance. Lenin took power on the slogan “Peace, Bread, and Land,” and he needed to be free of the war in order to consolidate Bolshevik power. A peace conference convened at Brest-Litovsk on December 22, 1917, but it proceeded slowly while the two sides—one imperialist, the other incipiently totalitarian—bickered about the definition of “national self-determination.” On January 7, 1918, Trotsky asked for adjournment, still hoping for revolutionary outbreaks abroad. In fact, a mutiny in the Austrian fleet and a general strike movement in Berlin did occur but were easily suppressed. The Bolshevik leadership now faced three bad choices: to defy the Germans and risk conquest and overthrow; to relent and sign over half of European Russia to German control; or to pursue what Trotsky called “neither war nor peace” while awaiting the revolution in Germany. He also wished to avoid any sign of collusion with the German military, lest the Bolsheviks appear to be collaborationists. In the meantime the Germans and Austrians concluded the Brotfrieden (“bread peace”) with representatives of wheat-rich Ukraine. When, however, Bolshevik forces began to penetrate Ukraine—and the German high command tired of Trotsky’s rhetoric—the Germans broke off talks and ordered the army to resume its advance. The French ambassador immediately offered the Bolsheviks all aid if they would fight the Germans, but Lenin ordered an immediate capitulation. Germany now presented even harsher peace terms, and on March 3 the Bolsheviks signed. The Romanians then made peace on the 5th, and newly independent Finland signed a treaty with Germany on the 7th.

In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Bolshevik regime turned over to Germany 34 percent of Russia’s population, 32 percent of Russia’s farmland, 54 percent of Russia’s industrial plant, 89 percent of Russia’s coal mines, and virtually all of its cotton and oil. These economic gains in the east, plus the release of troops who could now be shifted to the Western Front, revived German hopes that victory was achievable before the Americans arrived in force.

Negative views of the Bolshevik Revolution predominated from the start in Western capitals, although some people on the left in London, Paris, and Washington sympathized with it or thought it would bring much needed “efficiency” to Russia. The French and British had talked of supporting this or that Russian faction with arms or cash and had agreed on a tentative division of southern Russia into areas of responsibility. The German advance of February then caused the Allied missions to flee Petrograd and reassemble in remote Vologda, where they waited to see what direction the Bolsheviks would take. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk answered the question. It was an unparalleled disaster for the beleaguered Allies, who now had to consider intervention in Russia. First, if they could link up with nationalist Russians and reopen the Eastern Front, they might save their exhausted armies in France from facing the full might of the Central Powers. Second, it would be most helpful if they could save Allied war matériel that had stacked up in Russian ports (some 162,495 tons of supplies in Arkhangelsk alone) from seizure by the Germans or Bolsheviks and distribute it to Russians still willing to fight Germans.

When the German onslaught on the Western Front opened in March, the French and British became desperate for a diversion in the East. In March 1918 an Anglo-French expedition docked at Murmansk, followed in June by an American cruiser and 150 marines. An Anglo-French force occupied Arkhangelsk in August, and 4,500 U.S. soldiers under British command joined them in September. These tiny contingents, totaling about 28,000 men, were never meant to overthrow the Bolshevik regime, although the British hoped they might serve as magnets for White Russian forces opposing the Bolsheviks.

The Japanese, seeking an imperial foothold on the Asian mainland, used Brest-Litovsk as pretext to occupy Vladivostok in April. Wilson then committed U.S. troops to Siberia in order to keep an eye on the Japanese and to make contact with 30,000 Czechoslovak legionnaires, mostly former prisoners of war from the Habsburg armies seeking to escape Russia to fight for an independent Czech state. The Czechoslovak Legion, released and armed by the Kerensky government, at first declared neutrality toward Russian politics, but when the Bolsheviks tried to disarm them, skirmishes ensued, and the legion became strung out along the 6,000-mile-long Trans-Siberian Railway. The Allied interventions also became entangled in the erupting Russian Civil War. Bolsheviks controlled Petrograd, Moscow, and the core regions of Russia, while White governments were established by Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak in Omsk and General Anton Denikin in Odessa.

The eastern minorities

The saga of the Czechoslovak Legion was symbolic of the growing vigour of the national movements inside the Habsburg Empire. Early in the war the subject peoples had remained loyal to beloved old Franz Joseph. But martial law, which fell especially hard on minorities, war weariness, hunger, and the example of the Russian Revolution converted moderates among the Czechs, Galician Poles, and South Slavs to the cause of independence. The Czechs and Slovaks were brilliantly served by Tomáš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, who lobbied for Allied recognition of a Czech national council. The Polish movement, led by Józef Piłsudski, sought to establish similar national institutions and cooperated with the Central Powers after their Two Emperors’ Manifesto (November 5, 1916) promised autonomy to the Poles. The Polish National Committee in France, and famed pianist Ignacy Paderewski in the United States, also pleaded the Polish cause. Yugoslav (or South Slav) agitation was complicated by rivalries between the Serbs (Orthodox, Cyrillic alphabet, and politically stronger) and the Croats and Slovenes (Roman Catholic, Latin alphabet, politically disinherited), as well as Serbia’s and Italy’s conflicting claims to the Dalmatian coast. In July 1917 the factions united in the Corfu Declaration that envisioned a Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. All the committees then gathered in Rome for a Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in April 1918.

The Allies stood aloof from the nationalities while hope persisted of detaching Austria-Hungary from Germany. But in 1918 the Allies took up the revolutionary weapon. In April 1918 Masaryk sailed to the United States, won personal recognition from Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing, and concluded the Pittsburgh Convention by which Slovak-Americans, on behalf of their countrymen, agreed to join the Czechs in a united state. The Czechoslovak National Council won official recognition as a co-belligerent and de facto government-in-exile from France in June, Britain in August, and the United States in September. Only their quarrel with Italy kept the Yugoslavs from achieving the same. Thus, de facto governments were prepared to assume control of successor states as soon as Habsburg authority should collapse, internally or on the military fronts.

Germany’s final battles

Ironically, the Germans did not take maximum advantage of Brest-Litovsk after all, leaving about a million men—60 divisions—in the East in order to coerce the Ukrainians into relinquishing foodstuffs, to pursue political goals in the Baltic, and to ensure Bolshevik compliance. Facing virtual starvation as economic exhaustion deepened and the Allied blockade grew more effective, the German high command decided on a series of all-out attacks on the Western Front, beginning in March 1918. But tactical errors, together with the Allies’ creation at last of a unified command and the arrival in strength of eager U.S. divisions, blunted and then turned back the offensives. By late July it was clear that Germany had lost the war. The 1918 offensives cost 1,100,000 men and drained the Reich of reserves. Morale plummeted on the Western Front and at home. Then on August 8, 1918, British, Australian, and Canadian divisions struck on the Somme and overwhelmed German forces not adequately dug in. The 20,000 casualties, and an equal number of prisoners taken in one day, testified to the broken spirit of the German troops. Further Allied successes followed, and on September 29, 1918, General Erich Ludendorff, the chief of staff, informed the kaiser that the army was finished. The next day the new chancellor, the moderate Maximilian, prince of Baden, was authorized to seek an armistice. On the night of October 3–4 he requested an armistice from President Wilson on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

While negotiations began for an armistice in the West, Germany’s allies elsewhere collapsed. The collapse of the Bulgarian front before the Franco-Serbian offensive ended with the French cavalry capture of Skopje on September 29, whereupon the Allies accepted Bulgaria’s petition for peace in the Armistice of Salonika. This opened Constantinople to attack and prompted the Turks as well to sue for peace. It also left Austria-Hungary, stymied on the Italian front, with little recourse. On October 4 Vienna appealed to President Wilson for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points. But the U.S. note of the 18th indicated that autonomy for the nationalities no longer sufficed and thus amounted to the writ of execution for the Habsburg Empire. On October 28, in Prague and Kraków, Czech and Polish committees declared independence from Vienna. The Croats in Zagreb did the same on the 29th pending their union with the Serbs, and Germans in the Reichsrat proclaimed rump Austria an independent state on the 30th. The Armistice of Villa Giusti (November 4) required Austria-Hungary to evacuate all occupied territory, the South Tirol, Tarvisio, Gorizia, Trieste, Istria, western Carniola, and Dalmatia, and to surrender its navy. Emperor Charles, his empire gone, pledged to withdraw from Austria’s politics on November 11 and from Hungary’s on the 13th.

The first U.S. note responding to the German request for an armistice was sent on October 8 and called for evacuation by Germany of all occupied territory. The German reply sought to ensure that all the Allies would respect the Fourteen Points. The second U.S. note reflected high dudgeon about Germany’s seeking assurances, given her own war policies. In any case, the British, French, and Italians (fearing Wilsonian leniency and angry about not being consulted after the first note) insisted that their military commands be consulted on the armistice terms. This in turn gave the Allies a chance to ensure that Germany be rendered unable to take up resistance again in the future, whatever the eventual peace terms, and that their own war aims might be advanced through the armistice terms—e.g., surrender of the German navy for the British, occupation of Alsace-Lorraine and the Rhineland for the French. Wilson’s second note, therefore, shattered German illusions about using the armistice as a way of sowing discord among the Allies or winning a breathing space for themselves. The third German note (October 20) agreed to the Allies setting the terms and indicated, by way of appeasing Wilson, that Maximilian’s civilian cabinet had replaced any “arbitrary power” (Wilson’s phrase) in Berlin. The third U.S. note (October 23) specified that the armistice would render Germany incapable of resuming hostilities. Ludendorff wanted further resistance, but the kaiser instead asked for his resignation on the 26th. The next day Germany acknowledged Wilson’s note.

Some Allied leaders, most notably Poincaré and General John Pershing, bitterly disputed the wisdom of offering Germany an armistice when her armies were still on foreign soil. Marshall Ferdinand Foch drafted military terms harsh enough for the skeptics, however, and Georges Clemenceau could not in good conscience permit the killing to go on if Germany were rendered defenseless. Meanwhile, House, sent by Wilson to Paris to consult with the Allies, threatened a separate U.S.-German peace to win Allied approval of the Fourteen Points on November 4 (excepting a British reservation about “freedom of the seas,” a French one about “removal of economic barriers and equality of trade conditions,” and a clause enjoining Germany to repair war damage). House and Wilson jubilantly concluded that the foundations of a liberal peace were in place: substitution of the Fourteen Points for the Allies’ “imperialist” war aims and the transition of Germany to democracy. The fourth U.S. note (November 5) informed the Germans of Allied agreement and the procedures for dealing with Foch.

Germany, however, seemed to be moving less toward democracy than toward anarchy. On October 29 the naval command ordered the High Seas Fleet to leave port for a last-ditch battle, prompting a mutiny, then full insurrection on November 3. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils formed in ports and industrial cities, and a socialist Republic of Bavaria was declared on the 8th. Two days later Maximilian announced the abdication of Kaiser William II and his own resignation, and the Social Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert formed a provisional government. On the 10th the kaiser went into Dutch exile. The armistice delegation led by Erzberger, meanwhile, met with Foch in a railway carriage at Rethondes on the 8th. Erzberger, begging for amelioration of the Allies’ terms and especially for the lifting of the blockade so that Germany might be fed, raised the spectre of bolshevism. Receiving only minor concessions, the Germans relented and signed the Armistice on November 11, 1918. It called on Germany to evacuate and turn over to Allied armies all occupied regions, Alsace-Lorraine, the left (west) bank of the Rhine, and the bridgeheads of Mainz and Koblenz. A neutral zone of 10 kilometres on the right bank of the Rhine was also to be evacuated, the entire German navy surrendered, and the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest renounced. Germany was also to turn over a large number of locomotives, munitions, trucks, and other matériel—and to promise reparation for damage done.

The collapse of the old order

The four years’ carnage of World War I was the most intense physical, economic, and psychological assault on European society in its history. The war took directly some 8,500,000 lives and wounded another 21,000,000. The demographic damage done by the shortage of young virile men over the next 20 years is incalculable. The cost of the war has been estimated at more than 200,000,000,000 1914 dollars, with some $36,800,000,000 more in damage. Much of northern France, Belgium, and Poland lay in ruin, while millions of tons of Allied shipping rested at the bottom of the sea. The foundation stone of prewar financial life, the gold standard, was shattered, and prewar trade patterns were hopelessly disrupted.

Economic recovery, vital to social stability and the containment of revolution, depended on political stability. But how could political stability be restored when four great empires—the Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman—had fallen, the boundaries of old and new states alike were yet to be fixed, vengeful passions ran high, and conflicting national aims and ideologies competed for the allegiance of the victors? In World War I, Europe lost its unity as a culture and polity, its sense of common destiny and inexorable progress. It lost much of its automatic reverence for the old values of country, church, family, duty, honour, discipline, glory, and tradition. The old was bankrupt. It remained only to decide which newness would take its place.

The damage wrought by war would live on through the erosion of faith in 19th-century liberalism, international law, and Judeo-Christian values. Whatever the isolated acts of charity and chivalry by soldiers struggling in the trenches to remain human, governments and armies had thrown away, one by one, the standards of decency and fair play that had governed European warfare, more or less, in past centuries. Total war meant the starving of civilians through naval blockade, torpedoing of civilian craft, bombing of open cities, use of poison gas in the trenches, and reliance on tactics of assault that took from the private soldier any dignity, control over his fate, or hope of survival. World War I subordinated the civilian to the military and the human to the machine. It remained only for such imperious cynicism to impose itself in peacetime as well, in totalitarian states modeled on war government, until the very distinction between war and peace broke down in the 1930s.